Posts tagged cell

Researchers have had success growing organs in controlled lab environments, but repeating that feat inside a complex, messy animal body? That's more than a little tricky. However, researchers at the University of Edinburgh have managed that daunting feat for the first time. They've grown thymus gl...

Scientists at the Cockrell School of Engineering in Texas have created a nanomotor less than one micrometer in diameter, smaller even than a cell. Powered by electric fields, it consists of a nanowire, magnet and electrode and can spin at a terrifying-sounding 18,000 RPM for over 15 hours (see vid...

It's a brand new day for Cricket, AT&T's budget wireless arm. Last year, the mobile giant announced plans to acquire Leap Wireless, Cricket's parent company, and has since launched a major refresh, formally introducing the new service today. After purchasing new devices, Cricket customers will...

It turns out that your biology teacher (and a certain 1997 sci-fi flick) got something wrong -- DNA isn't necessarily limited to four letters. Scripps Research Institute scientists tell Wired that they've created living cells which include two artificial letters (that is, nucleotides) in their ge...

It's relatively easy to clone embryos from the adult stem cells of simpler animals like sheep, but humans have proved challenging. Even an attempt last year only used baby cells. The process just took a gigantic step forward, though, as scientists have finally used an adult human's stem cells to c...

Whether you asked for a curved phone or not, they're already a convex reality. One that introduces a few manufacturing twists. A curved screen is one thing, but what about other large components like the battery? Samsung sidestepped this issue in the Round by making it narrow and tall, but there's...

Previous work on using organisms as circuitry has usually involved shoehorning parts of the digital world into a very analog environment. MIT has just found an approach that uses the subtlety of the natural world to its advantage: the circuits themselves are analog. By combining genes that produc...

For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their lifespans can be brutally short. See IBM's Roadrunner as a textbook example: the 116,640-core cluster was smashing records just five years ago, and yet it's already considered so behind the times that Los Alamos National Laboratory is ...

It's easy to find work on gene-based storage; finding genes that will do any of the heavy lifting is another matter. MIT believes it has a genetic circuit that will finally get to work, and then some. In using recombinase enzymes to alter DNA sequences serving as logic gates, researchers have deve...

Bluegrass Cellular is a regional carrier down in the Bluegrass state of Kentucky, and the relatively small network has some big news: It's going to be carrying the iPhone 5. The prices are pretty standard for the various wireless plans, but the biggest part of this news is that a regional carri...

We've looked intensely at the outside of the redesigned PlayStation 3 ever since it was unveiled in Tokyo last month. Getting a look inside has proven unusually tougher, but French YouTube member K0st3yr has volunteered to do what few gamers dare and tear down Sony's updated console. As we've quic...

Electron microscopes can produce incredibly detailed and even 3D views of sub-cellular structures, but often at the cost of losing the bigger picture. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, however, have leveraged a technique called virtual nanoscopy that enables researchers to obser...

Believe it or not, EV battery life is still something of a Pandora's Box, even for automakers: they can tell you the battery pack's current and voltage, but not how it's really performing under pressure. Ford, GE and the University of Michigan are uniting to unlock that mystery through a new ARPA-...

We've seen fuel cells used in a variety of gadgets -- from cars to portable chargers -- and while medical devices aren't exactly at the top of the list, they're yet another application for these mini power sources. MIT engineers are turning to sugar to make fuel cells for powering brain implants. ...

You've probably heard that the sun is strong enough to power our planet many times over, but without a practical method of harnessing that energy, there's no way to take full advantage. An incredibly thin and light solar cell could go a long way to accomplishing that on a smaller scale, however, ma...

The $19 all-you-can-eat smartphone service that seemed great, then not-so-great, then great again is about to re-open public beta testing. We're told that the first phase of the beta is "going very well", to the point where Republic Wireless feels it can "skip the baby steps" and offer its hybrid V...

If you've ever used a cell phone while moving, then you've probably experienced the depressed network connectivity that becomes more of an issue as you move further away from any given tower. Some of us are even unfortunate enough to reside or work right at the edge of a cell, forced to live with...

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. In the pre-smartphone era, the industry focused on making cell phones smaller. In the 2001 movie Zoolander, the title character played by Ben Stiller uses a humorously diminutive flip phone closer to the size of a Bl...

Researchers over at the National Renewable Energy Lab have reportedly made the first solar cell with an external quantum efficiency over 100 percent. Quantum efficiency relates to the number of electrons-per-second flowing in a solar cell circuit, divided by the number of photons from the energy ...

It's taken many years and more than a bit of brainpower, but researchers at the University of Central Florida have finally found a way to create neuromuscular connectors between muscle and spinal cord cells, using only stem cells. Led by bioengineer James Hickman, the team pulled off the feat wit...